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The race to the moon is back — NASA needs to get serious to beat the Chinese

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:57 -0500

Just before my final, 2001 shuttle mission to help build the International Space Station, I asked the NASA chief of human spaceflight when he thought we’d return to the moon. "Oh, probably not until 2010," he answered. I was floored — how could it possibly take that long to jump from the shuttle and ISS to the moon? After all, we’d landed there six times between 1969 and 1972.

NASA’s efforts to return to the moon, home to valuable space resources, have been repeatedly stalled by shifting space policies and failures in leadership. Finally, 25 years after my question, NASA is ready to make that giant leap. It rolled its giant Space Launch System booster to the launch pad and is poised to send the Artemis II crew of four astronauts on a looping path nearly 5,000 miles beyond our celestial neighbor.

President Donald Trump’s first administration directed NASA to lead an international return to the moon with the Artemis program, but progress has been delayed by halting technical progress and anemic funding. Artemis II will launch the first Orion spacecraft crew on a key, 10-day test flight to wring out their ship’s systems, and test astronauts and mission controllers in the harsh environment 240,000 miles from Earth. A successful flight — the first piloted moon journey since 1972’s Apollo 17, will pave the way for the next Artemis crew to try a harrowing touchdown on the lunar surface.

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Though Artemis II won’t try to land, it’s still a risky and challenging flight. Their Orion, "Integrity," will venture into the extreme environment of cislunar space, a thousand times farther from Earth than the space station’s orbiting astronauts. Orion’s four astronauts will rely on its new life support system for 10 days, and if there’s a problem, an emergency abort to Earth might take as long as three or four days. Crew and mission control must navigate precisely around the moon to safely target their Earth return, where Orion’s heat shield must survive a searing, 5,000˚ F plunge through the atmosphere to splashdown.

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During Artemis I’s uncrewed reentry in 2022, Orion’s heat shield, instead of charring and eroding smoothly away, shed palm-sized chunks of its resin-like Avcoat ablator material. That worrisome cracking behavior, caused by trapped, superheated gas within the heat shield, has taken three years to analyze and understand. To minimize gas generation and spalling of the heat shield, mission planners have altered Artemis II’s reentry path. NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, praised the heat shield plan after a review, and cleared Artemis II to fly.

A solid Artemis II success is vital for NASA; proving technical competence is vital to maintaining congressional and presidential funding for the lunar landing challenge to come. Isaacman and his mission managers must not only ensure the success and safety of Artemis II, but make a critical decision in the weeks ahead: how best to field a lander that can get future Artemis crews down to the moon’s rocky terrain.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket was chosen by NASA to serve as Artemis III’s lander, but Starship has progressed slowly in test launches, suffering several major setbacks. Each Starship lander launch from Earth will require 15 or more other Starship launches to fuel it for its lunar mission, and SpaceX is nowhere near attempting its promised robotic demo mission to the moon.

Isaacman has re-opened the lander design to other concepts, perhaps from Blue Origin or other industry partnerships; one workable approach was outlined before Congress last year by former administrator Mike Griffin. But time is running out for NASA to decide on a lander that will do the job within two or three years — China is forging ahead with its own plans to send its taikonauts to the moon by 2030.

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China won’t take that long. The CCP is far along in testing its own heavy-lift moon rocket, command ship and lander. Merely by repeating our Apollo 11 moon feat — something NASA can’t do today — China will celebrate a deep space propaganda victory and lay claim to the Moon’s polar ice — hundreds of millions of tons of water and potential rocket fuel.

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Competing for those resources calls for bold NASA leadership, lately in short supply. To lead its partners back to the moon, that probably means putting SpaceX on the back burner while choosing a more practical lander design in the near term.

Artemis II will take three Americans and a Canadian around the moon for the first time in 54 years. Establishing a permanent human presence on the moon will be even more challenging. Building on Artemis II’s bold leap moonward, NASA must direct a new, workable plan for the Artemis III lander. Only then will NASA prove it has the "Right Stuff" to lead to the moon and beyond.

Veteran NASA Astronaut Tom Jones: Apollo 11 anniversary -- America must lead a return to the moon

Sat, 20 Jul 2019 06:00:46 -0400

The nation’s effort to return American astronauts to the moon is a vital first step toward interplanetary voyages to nearby asteroids and Mars.

Tapping the moon’s resources will prove essential to establishing a human presence elsewhere in our solar system.

By leading the way to the moon and beyond, America will invent new technologies, help secure our national security, boost our economic competitiveness, inspire millions of young people, and rebuild confidence in our society’s ability to meet difficult challenges.

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When Apollo 11 reached the moon fifty years ago, it gave the nation a highly visible and long-lasting technological edge which contributed directly to winning the Cold War.

Returning to the moon as part of the larger human exploration of deep space will deliver similar results and stand as evidence of America’s global technological leadership.

Today our leadership in space is precarious at best. The International Space Station (ISS), the current symbol of American space achievement, has only a decade of life remaining.

Meanwhile, a new Chinese space station is headed for orbit next year, and in January China landed its second lunar rover, this time on the moon’s far side.

China plans to reach the moon with human explorers by about 2030. When that happens—and China can certainly do it—America’s absence on the moon will demonstrate to the world that our space and technological abilities are second-rate.

As a nation, we must decide whether to lead the way to deep space or become a footnote in the still-unfolding saga of exploration.

In March, President Trump directed NASA to lead an international effort to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. The agency must speed development of its Orion deep space transport and its powerful new launcher, the Space Launch System.

Together with commercial systems, Orion and the SLS can put us on the moon and start us toward Mars, IF the agency and industry receive the necessary resources.

Numbers show that NASA’s budget has steadily lost buying power for at least 20 years, with its share of the federal budget similarly dropping from 0.8 to 0.47 percent (it peaked at 4.4 percent during Apollo). Yet that decaying budget had to operate the space shuttle, construct an International Space Station, and engineer new deep space systems.

That latter task has suffered, delaying exploration beyond Earth for too long.

Americans have not walked on the moon or even orbited it since 1972. It’s a national embarrassment.

Bold plans must be matched by necessary resources. With a ten percent increase in NASA’s budget, we will not merely repeat Apollo’s brief lunar visits; we will instead build a sustainable, reusable lunar transportation system. We will stay longer, harness the moon’s resources, reuse our spaceships, and prove the machines and skills we will need at Mars.

The 2024 deadline is key to our success at the moon. It’s not that the technical challenges of getting to the moon and back are unsolvable—the Apollo team conquered those.

The obstacle today is a lack of urgency: Congress funding space operations “as usual.” For example, Orion and its SLS booster have been under development since 2005, yet the Orion spacecraft has flown just a single 2014 test flight, and its moon-rated booster has yet to fly.

To get on track, we must enlist our space station partners and commercial space firms in returning astronauts to the moon by 2024.

We must advance the testing and flight schedule for Orion and the Space Launch System rocket, launching a first test mission in 2020 and a crewed mission by 2022, and at least two flights per year thereafter.

We must establish the lunar Gateway station in orbit around the moon by 2022. Commercial space firms can help NASA develop this small outpost, along with the piloted landers needed to return Americans to the moon.

Once we return, NASA and its partners must build a lunar science outpost near the moon’s south pole by 2028. There we will test the reusable landers, spacesuits, mining gear, water and rocket fuel plants, and safe nuclear power sources needed for travel to Mars and beyond.

NASA’s plans for returning to the moon are ambitious, but speed is a galvanizing force.

The 2024 deadline has energized the agency and will enlist public and international support.

If, however, we continue the pace of the past fifteen years, by 2030 we will watch a competing space power land its explorers on the moon. Without a sense of urgency, we will lose our technological edge in space and on Earth.

Reigniting the competitive spirit that served us so well during Apollo, we can ensure that Earth-moon space will be open to liberty-loving peoples, democratic ideals, and free markets.

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Leading a partnership of free, space-faring nations back to the moon within five years will prepare us to reach beyond, to the knowledge and resources waiting at the nearby asteroids and Mars.

Returning to the moon is a vital step on an exciting American journey—let’s again make that “giant leap” we took first in 1969.

Ex-NASA astronaut: World Asteroid Day – Will we defend our planet together or perish like the dinosaurs?

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 14:09:00 -0400

Saturday is Asteroid Day, an annual, global educational event aimed at learning more about the hazard that nearby asteroids pose to Earth and our civilization, and marshaling support for the search and deflection technologies we need to protect our planet. Many thousands will gather around the world this weekend to hear the latest science on the asteroid hazard, and what we can do to prevent a future damaging impact. (For more visit AsteroidDay.org)

Asteroid Day falls on June 30, the anniversary of the 1908 asteroid impact in Tunguska, Siberia – the largest in recorded human history. That 3 – to 5 – megaton blast above the conifer forest flattened about 800 square miles of trees; a similar airburst today over a modern city would cause severe destruction and death.

The history of impacts on Earth, and our studies of near-Earth asteroids, tells us with certainty that our planet will be struck again – unless we act together to head off hazardous asteroids.

This year’s Asteroid Day is the fourth such global event. The astronauts’ international professional society, the Association of Space Explorers, proposed to the United Nations in 2016 that Asteroid Day be recognized as a global educational event. The General Assembly approved their suggestion later that same year.

Fifty years ago, the first astronauts to orbit and later walk on the moon saw with their own eyes a world blasted with the countless scars – craters – of asteroid and comet impacts.

Such craters are familiar landmarks for my Earth-orbiting colleagues; I saw a dozen or more on my four shuttle missions. These scars show that our world suffers from the same 4.5 – billion – year – old cosmic bombardment process. Geologists now count about 190 craters scattered across continents and seafloors.

A Global Hazard

Protecting Earth from future impacts is a shared responsibility: all of us, in every country, are at risk from this cosmic rain.

The Association of Space Explorers continues to contribute to United Nations discussions of how to find asteroids and prevent an impact. The U.N. even adopted, in 2013, several of our suggestions on how to share asteroid sightings and warnings and make cooperative efforts to test deflection methods.

More importantly, the world’s space agencies, with active NASA leadership, have advanced the science of asteroid detection and the identification of technologies that can nudge a rogue asteroid from its collision path with Earth. These conversations have led to a proposed deflection demonstration mission, called DART, that if funded will slam into a harmless asteroid in 2022 and change its orbital path. The results of that bullet shot, observed by Earth astronomers and a proposed European observer craft, will tell us if we’re ready to use this “kinetic impact” method on a future threatening asteroid. Other methods, like the gravity tractor and directed energy beams, should undergo their own in-space tests, too.

Defending Earth Together

NASA and its partner space agencies have cataloged over 18,000 near–Earth asteroids, and none have yet been found to pose a future threat to Earth. But in the past decade, NASA–funded searches have discovered three small asteroids -- too tiny to reach the ground -- and predicted their harmless incineration in the atmosphere. These impacts were observed by satellites and ground observers (from my perch on the space shuttle, I was fascinated to see meteoroids burn up in the atmosphere below me).

In 2013, a 60–foot asteroid plunged into Earth’s atmosphere without warning over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. The asteroid’s disintegration generated a half-megaton shock wave that blew out windows, damaged roofs, and sent more than a thousand to the hospital. No one was killed.

Chelyabinsk’s unexpected arrival reminded us of the need to increase the pace and sensitivity of our asteroid search. A modest infrared telescope, comparable in cost to a Mars orbiter mission, would find a large fraction of objects, 140 meters and larger, capable of causing regional destruction on our planet. A collision with one of these objects could devastate, for example, Washington, D.C. and five or six surrounding states. Congress directed NASA to perform this search back in 2005 but didn’t provide the funds. We should encourage our representatives to give NASA the funds to fly the proposed NEOCam telescope within the next five years.

NASA also needs the money to build and launch its DART deflection demonstrator craft, aiming to measurably nudge asteroid Didymos – B in October 2022.

Asteroid Day is a reminder to us to nudge lawmakers to fully fund this important test. Because of the worldwide hazard posed by asteroids, I hope NASA will be joined by its partner space agencies in paying for these two planetary defense missions.

The more asteroids we discover, and the more we learn about them (through, for example, the Japanese and U.S. asteroid science missions arriving this summer at two target asteroids), the more rapidly we can employ these objects in our exploration efforts. Water, metals, and even rocks and dust from asteroids can be used to increase the safety of Mars–bound astronauts, lower the mission cost, and grow a vibrant asteroid mining economy in and around the Earth– Moon system.

A Preventable Disaster

We now possess the space technologies needed to identify and stop the threat from dangerous asteroids.

We are slowly building a better ability to find dangerous asteroids, and our computers can project known asteroid orbits a century into the future to predict possible impacts.

NASA and its partner agencies are also planning actual space tests that will show us how to change the orbits of near–Earth asteroids and ensure we can divert those that might have deadly appointments with Earth. But these efforts take money, and in the interests of public safety, we should fund them promptly and fully. (The NEOCam search mission, for example, would total much less than one percent of NASA’s budget over ten years).

We already have many answers to our questions about asteroids. However, the most important one is still unanswered: Do we have the will to act together to defend our planet? If we answer yes, then humanity will survive and spread rapidly across the solar system. If we fail to act, we are certain to suffer the fate of the dinosaurs.

Asteroid Day 2017 - rogue comets and diverting them from Planet Earth

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

The last day of June is an international recognition of Asteroid Day, a global, public discussion of the hazards posed to Earth and our civilization by asteroid and comet impacts.

June 30, 2017 marks the 109th anniversary of the 40-meter-wide asteroid impact over Tunguska, Siberia, that flattened 2000 square km (800 square miles) of conifer forest. That 3- to 5-megaton explosion, generated by an asteroid impact that occurs on average every millennium, is a reminder of the devastation that awaits our society if we fail to act to prevent a future impact.

Last year the United Nations recognized Asteroid Day as a global education event, aimed at raising awareness of cosmic impacts and the need for nations to work together to head off a future impact event. The professional society of astronauts and cosmonauts, the Association of Space Explorers, introduced the United Nations measure that recognized Asteroid Day.

We space fliers have seen the cosmic scars on Earth created by past impacts, and our international collaboration in space is an example of how we should apply our joint skills in space technology to find rogue asteroids and divert them from a collision with Earth.

Asteroid Day is a 24-hour global conversation kicking off on the eve of June 30, and features a day-long live broadcast from this year’s Asteroid Day headquarters in Luxembourg. The broadcast features asteroid science documentaries, interviews with scientists, astronauts, and policy makers, and interactive conversations with asteroid experts around the globe. In addition, close to a thousand events celebrating Asteroid Day will take place around the globe; you can see the program and the map online at AsteroidDay.org. You can also participate on Twitter at #AsteroidDayLive.

During my astronaut training, I explored the depths of Arizona’s Meteor Crater, hiked the floor of Texas’ Odessa impact crater, and took in the view from the rim of the Henbury Crater complex in Australia’s great red Outback. From orbit, I observed a dozen or more impact scars scattered across the globe, some of the approximately 190 craters showing how our home planet has endured billions of years of cosmic bombardment.

We humans will endure another devastating asteroid or comet impact — one that could wipe out a city, a region of a continent, or our global civilization – unless we work together at finding dangerous asteroids and demonstrate our ability to change the orbit of one headed our way.

We need to support efforts to launch an infrared space telescope to hunt for the million or so objects that could threaten us, and ask your lawmakers to fund a deflection demonstration, like the joint NASA-ESA “AIDA” mission to nudge the orbit of a harmless asteroid with a high-speed spacecraft collision.

We’re all piloting this spaceship Earth together, and Asteroid Day is a wonderful opportunity to learn how to protect it.

On behalf of the Association of Space Explorers, I’ll be speaking about Asteroid Day and the asteroid hazard at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on June 30. Let’s talk asteroids!

For more information go to www.AstronautTomJones.com.

Obama's Hollow Promise On Space

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:37:45 -0400

President Obama, with his speech on Thursday, seems to have heard and acted on some of the criticism of his controversial February budget proposal for NASA. He had proposed then to shift the nation’s astronaut access to orbit to commercial rockets and spacecraft, and cancelled NASA’s Constellation program to return astronauts to the moon and deep space.

On Thursday, he attempted to refute claims that these shifts marked a strategic retreat from U.S. leadership in space. He stated his clear support for human space voyages to nearby asteroids, to the moons of Mars, and eventually to the surface of Mars itself. He promised to decide in 2015 on the design for a new heavy lift rocket, the booster that would then send U.S. astronauts to those deep space destinations. He also revamped Constellation’s Orion spacecraft, meant for lunar voyages, as an emergency lifeboat to be berthed at the International Space Station.

These commitments to a vigorous space exploration program are all to the good. But the president’s budget speaks louder than his words. His extra $6 billion for NASA over the next five years does little more than pace inflation, and cannot fund both the revised Orion spacecraft, the “bold” research to enable deep space travel, “breakthrough” propulsion systems, and a realistic program to send humans into deep space. His lack of a firm schedule and proposed funds for these achievements (an asteroid mission would not occur before 2025) means that his NASA vision has little chance of becoming reality.

After the shuttle retires later this year, NASA will have no route to the ISS other than rented seats on Russian rockets, at $55 million per seat. The nation will have to wait until commercial companies, with no record of yet launching a single new human-rated rocket or spacecraft, learn the lessons NASA has accumulated during 50 years of spaceflight experience. There is no backup system in case of the commercial firms’ failure. Worst of all, NASA’s unmatched team of spaceflight experts will disperse after the shuttle retires—there will be no work for them. Will we ever see such a team, with its knowledge and spirit, challenging the space frontier again?

Without a schedule to leave Earth orbit behind, and funds to match, that talent pool will rapidly drain away. Neil Armstrong and other veteran astronauts and flight directors conclude that our nation will quickly become an also-ran in space, with no better capabilities on the frontier than Russia, China, or India.

Last year the U.S. had a proven spacecraft in the shuttle, and a well-defined plan for sending American astronauts to deep space. Next year we will have no spacecraft, and no credible plan to develop our own deep space craft for a decade or more. Our experienced NASA team will have left for jobs elsewhere—if they can find them. Our claims for space leadership will be believed only by the president’s speechwriters.

Success in rocket science, in exploration, demands real-world skill, adequate resources, and vigorous leadership. Certainly we can afford the 0.7% of the federal budget necessary to retain global leadership in human spaceflight. The extra $3 billion per year that the president’s own expert panel recommended for NASA would be a continuing stimulus to our high-tech work force, and an inspiration to our brightest young people, who won’t wait decades to decide on careers in science and engineering.

The Congress should correct the president’s short-sighted course and give NASA an ambitious exploration goal and schedule. It should provide the necessary funding to assure our access to space, then send American explorers to deep space destinations within a decade. By renewing our commitment to demonstrated leadership in space, we will continue to reap the economic, technological, and scientific rewards of exploration on the high frontier.

Tom Jones is a four-time shuttle astronaut, planetary scientist, consultant, author, speaker and Fox News contributor. His latest book is Planetology: Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System. For more visit: www.AstronautTomJones.com.

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NASA's Real Challenge

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:25:41 -0400

NASA faces immense challenges. Its shuttle program will end early next year, and the space agency has no clear, approved plan to build the shuttle’s successor.

The International Space Station and its U.S. crew members, along with their partners, are conducting important research in orbit, and NASA must operate and sustain that facility with an intense focus on safety.

Due to inattention and lack of funding by our policy makers, American astronauts next year will be forced to reach the Station via Russian rockets, at least through 2015.

Once the shuttle retires, NASA doesn’t know when U.S. rockets will again launch astronauts from Cape Canaveral., or whether those rockets will be privately run, or government-owned, like the shuttle.

Even less certain are the means for NASA to reach deep space, beyond the space station to the nearby asteroids or the Moon, and when American explorers might be ready for such a journey. Congress and the president have not reached any agreement on a way forward.

NASA’s focus should be on proposing a vigorous, sustainable program of human and robotic exploration, building the means to carry it out, and seeking the support of the public and policy makers to continue American leadership in space exploration, particularly in the inspirational field of human spaceflight.

NASA’s people are properly focused on their technical mission, and I hope NASA’s leaders will follow their example.

Tom Jones is a planetary scientist, four-time shuttle astronaut and Fox News contributor. His book “Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir,” details the human dimensions of space flight. For more visit www.AstronautTomJones.com.

Fox Forum is on Twitter. Follow us @fxnopinion.

The Space Shuttle Lifts Off for the Last Time -- Will We Retreat from the Last Frontier?

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 13:20:52 -0400

This morning I watched four astronaut friends drive by cheering crowds at the Kennedy Space Center, enroute to their final space shuttle launch aboard Atlantis. Smiling appreciatively with their strap-in technicians, Chris Ferguson, Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus, and Rex Walheim took their places on Atlantis’ storied flight deck. I recalled my last flight aboard Atlantis, also bound for the International Space Station (ISS). That orbital outpost is now complete; the STS-135 crew will deliver one last 8,000 pound load of critical supplies and spare parts 220 miles up, to the ISS.

The promise of the Station is that it’s a stepping stone in terms of experience and research to more ambitious voyages.

The shuttle fleet has put us in the position, after three decades, of setting our sights beyond Earth orbit, back to the Moon, the nearby asteroids, and eventually to Mars. The orbiters and their crews have also built up a tremendous reserve of operations experience, with astronauts capable of taking on complex spacewalking and robotic work that would have amazed the shuttle’s 1970s designers.

If married to new spacecraft and boosters, commercial industry and NASA could turn our hard-won experience to creating a 21st century industrial park in space, even as we continue scientific exploration of the Moon, nearby asteroids, and eventually Mars.

NASA has turned to commercial companies to provide near-term transportation to the Space Station, probably no sooner than 2015. The commercial approach runs the risk of leaving the nation with only Russian access to the ISS for five years or more—NASA has no backup plan. The lack of “Plan B” in the near term, and the long term lack of a serious program to go beyond the Space Station into deep space, makes saying good-bye to the shuttle hard to swallow.

What can be done? An administration serious about America’s long-term leadership in space would:

- Increase NASA’s budget, to correct the fiscal neglect of NASA since the Columbia accident.

- Accelerate the arrival of commercial U.S. crew launch systems.

- Speed up the building of a true deep space vehicle and matching booster.

The cost? Perhaps an extra $3 billion per year, added to NASA’s $18.7 billion annual budget. This would increase NASA’s share of federal spending to 0.6% annually.

Before you gulp at the $3 billion number, think about this question: can we neglect to make this investment in our future? Consider that Medicare and Medicaid fraud wastes at least $87 billion of our taxpayer dollars every year. The White House can—and must—ensure that we don’t lose the tremendous technical and human legacy of the space shuttle. Here's what we need to do... now:

- Propose a realistic schedule to the Congress to reach an asteroid by 2020.

- Capitalize on the nearby resources of the moon.

- Put up the resources to make it happen within a decade.

We’re Americans – let’s do it!

Tapping the resources of Earth-Moon space, and reaping the scientific fruits of sending human explorers to nearby asteroids and the moon, are the surest ways to recognize the remarkable achievements of the space shuttle and the Americans that conceived it, built it, and made it a symbol of our vision for the future.

Godspeed Atlantis and her crew. I wish I was going with them.

Tom Jones is a Fox News contributor. He is a four-time shuttle astronaut, planetary scientist, author, and speaker. His website is www.AstronautTomJones.com.

Farewell to the Space Shuttle -- How Does America Soar Again?

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 06:18:02 -0400

When I last returned to Earth aboard space shuttle Atlantis, I could not imagine an end to the storied, sometimes tragic career of America’s workhorse fleet of spaceships.

Touchdown brought hopes that my crew’s construction work at the International Space Station (ISS) would see that outpost used as the jumping off point for sending explorers into deep space, thousands of times farther than its 220-mile-high orbit.

But to do what the shuttle could never do--escape Earth’s gravity to reach the Moon, the nearby asteroids, and eventually Mars, we would need a new generation of spacecraft and rockets.

This morning, ten years later, I stood by the three-mile-long runway to welcome Atlantis home. Commander Chris Ferguson and his crew gently settled the orbiter to Earth, returning to a space program I hardly recognize.

NASA overcame the 2003 loss of Columbia, and completed the assembly of the International Space Station (ISS), but as it ends the shuttle program it cannot resolve the confusion swirling around America’s future direction in space.

In the aftermath of the Columbia loss, President Bush committed the nation to return to the Moon, and explore beyond, but President Obama canceled the program, believing it too costly and impractical.

Our president has focused NASA instead on near-term transportation to the ISS, using commercial companies to carry cargo and astronauts to the Station.

Until at least 2015, we will be renting rides from the Russians at up to $63 million per seat.

The president also promised a new generation of spacecraft, capable of reaching a nearby asteroid by 2025.

In political terms, that date is light years away. The president’s budget for the next five years holds NASA funding flat, meaning those new ships may never become operational. Despite congressional prodding, NASA has yet to announce firm plans for a powerful new booster rocket, and its new space exploration craft won’t fly until at least 2017. There is no firm schedule of milestones to actually reach the 2025 asteroid goal.

Americans will continue to work and live on the ISS until at least 2025, but whether we go further and venture deeper into space again is anyone’s guess. -- A shared vision of the nation’s space ambitions has yet to crystallize between the White House and Congress.

The Chinese say they want to put their own explorers on the Moon around 2020. If we want to keep leadership in exploration and commerce as distinctive American traits, we need start pioneering again. Here’s a short list of what needs to be done:

1. Prioritize and fund NASA’s exploration program, even as we cut government spending. Exploration drives innovation in industry and inspires our students to excellence.

2. Speed commercial spacecraft efforts, to restore access to the ISS we built and paid for. There is no Plan B. NASA should share its fifty years of human spaceflight experience and insist on high safety standards.

3. Launch a series of robot explorers to scout nearby asteroids. The first, badly needed, will search for both hazardous asteroids (those threatening an Earth impact) and fill out our list of astronaut targets.

4. Send robot landers and rovers to prospect the Moon and determine if these “local” resources (water, metals, and key industrial materials) justify a return by astronauts.

5. Accelerate the building and testing of a new spacecraft that can reach the Moon or nearby asteroids. Fly it to the Space Station by 2016. Pick a new booster from among commercial NASA designs that offers the lowest long-term operations costs.

6. Launch astronaut scouting missions to circle the Moon by 2020. If resources beckon, develop with our international partners a lander to reach the surface.

7. Soon after, send astronauts to nearby asteroids to investigate the solar system’s origin, tap water and valuable resources, and learn how to protect the Earth from destructive impact. These multi-month missions will set us on a course for Mars.

As we explore, science will go hand in hand with technology and economic development. Solar energy might be beamed back to Earth, and raw materials from the Moon and asteroids should lower the costs of exploration, and spur a new wave of commercial innovation in space. Industrial parks should blossom between Earth orbit and the Moon.

What about the cost of ensuring our high-tech competitiveness, and pushing the boundaries of the space frontier? The president’s expert Augustine Committee estimated it at about $22 billion a year, just 0.6% of our federal budget. That’s half a penny out of every federal budget dollar. The extra $3 billion per year might come, in just one example, from wiping out the $87 billion (minimum) lost annually to fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid.

Today, Atlantis’s last crew-- Chris Ferguson, Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus, and Rex Walheim—made us proud to be Americans. We admire their courage, modesty, and undeniable professionalism. To retire this extraordinary American ability called the NASA shuttle program with no clear path set beyond, is a failure of leadership, but we can renew our purpose as explorers. The way to honor the brilliant pioneers who built and flew the shuttle is to turn their dedication and experience to opening up new discoveries and wealth on the space frontier.

Tom Jones is a four-time shuttle astronaut, scientist, author, speaker, and Fox News contributor. He recounts his shuttle experiences in “Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir.”

Why Americans must support NASA's plan to capture an asteroid

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:18:44 -0400

Grabbing a small, water-rich asteroid and returning it to a safe orbit around the moon is the new NASA mission concept, announced this week, generating excitement and controversy.

If the space agency wins approval to retrieve the asteroid by the early 2020s, U.S. astronauts will begin to prospect and dissect the object for its scientific and economic treasure. The concept is a bold combination of our robotic and human spaceflight technologies, propelling astronauts beyond-the-moon, and opening a new economic frontier to harness the wealth of natural resources waiting for us in space.

The robotic asteroid retrieval mission will pluck a 23-foot, 500-ton asteroid from its solar orbit and shepherd it by the early 2020s into a parking orbit around the moon.

Astronauts in the new Orion deep space craft will unwrap the “bagged” asteroid, dig deep into its secrets, and return hundreds of pounds of 4.5-billion-year old rock and dust for scientific examination.

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Visited repeatedly by international and commercial robot probes, the captured asteroid will serve as a scientific and industrial guinea pig, giving up its scientific mysteries and sparking the birth of a space natural resources industry.

In the ten-year, $2.6-billion venture, private firms will work with NASA to demonstrate how to extract water, construction material, and even strategic metals from the millions of asteroids that lurk near Earth’s orbit. Access to water, rocket fuel, chemicals, and metals from the asteroids and the Moon would lower dramatically the cost of exploring space, and launch profitable ventures from mining to manufacturing.

The first and most versatile product to go after is water --“space gold.” Water from Earth now costs $10,000 a pound to haul to orbit. Why not extract it in space, where we need it?

The water from a single 500-ton asteroid is worth about $1 billion at today’s launch prices. Baked out of surface minerals with concentrated sunshine, robotic miners can split water into the powerful rocket fuels hydrogen and oxygen, highly valuable to NASA and its partner space agencies.

Private space firms like Planetary Resources, Inc. and Deep Space Industries already plan to prospect and extract water from nearby asteroids. Access to a nearby asteroid would bring us closer to the day when industry can save NASA and its partners billions while turning a profit from space-produced materials.

Industry can also team with NASA to learn how to fashion asteroid metals into wire and structural beams, or process their complex organic compounds into industrial catalysts for space-based refineries. Although the first customers will be space agencies looking for affordable rocket fuel and drinking water, satellite operators and space tourism companies will sign on, too.

Asteroid retrieval won’t be easy: most are small, dim, and hard to detect from the ground, and NASA will need sensitive new telescopes to search for asteroid targets with the right orbit and chemical makeup.

Yet asteroids routinely find us, as we saw and heard in February over Chelyabinsk in Russia.

NASA can quickly harness existing or off-the-shelf telescopes to find and track these small asteroids, so far overlooked in our search for larger, more dangerous objects.

Much of the other technology for the retrieval mission is near at hand. NASA plans to demonstrate advanced solar electric propulsion, already tested on the Dawn asteroid mission. The capture mechanism, a tough fabric envelope opened and closed by graphite-composite stiffeners, draws on previous experience with tear-resistant spacesuit materials and lightweight communications antenna ribs. Experience gained on the capture mission will then feed directly into deep space systems needed for future astronaut journeys toward the Moon, asteroids and Mars.

The International Space Station (ISS) is well-positioned to assist in the industrial use of the captured asteroid. NASA and its ISS partners can use its versatile lab space to experiment with extracting water and metals from meteorites (asteroid “free samples”) under low gravity conditions. Industry should propose and help fund these demonstrations.

The ISS partners should also help expand the asteroid search network, and later provide transportation and equipment for initial visits to the captured asteroid. In return, their astronauts can join the U.S. on these deep space asteroid expeditions. The ISS partnership might expand into a public/private consortium to deliver fuels, metals, and chemicals from the moon and asteroids for space use.

One other valuable benefit: the act of capturing and moving a small asteroid is in fact a demonstration of technology that can help us ward off a future rogue asteroid impact. Astronaut examination of the asteroid will also give us valuable civil engineering knowledge that increases the chances we can pull off a deflection mission and prevent a cosmic catastrophe.

To jolt NASA from its doldrums, we must give the agency an exciting, practical focus that accelerates our move into deep space.

Capturing and retrieving an asteroid will energize NASA’s exploration efforts: first, access to nearby raw materials out of the Moon’s gravity well; next, expeditions to extract lunar resources or visit larger, “free range” asteroids; finally, using space resources to lower the cost and risk of Mars expeditions.

Along the way, we’ll create an industry that can free Earth from its finite resource limitations, paying for our space exploration efforts many times over.

Here is a space future both the White House and Congress can support. By “mining the sky” – for profit—we can enrich our society with new wealth and technological innovation.

This new mission will put Americans to work far beyond the moon, spur discovery and commerce on the newest American frontier, and give us the wealth and experience to begin the human exploration of Mars.